Microsoft Defender (Office 365) and Palo Alto Networks WildFire offer threat protection, however, they target different areas of security. Defender focuses on cloud-based threats within Microsoft 365 applications, while WildFire is a broader network security solution with sandboxing capabilities for analyzing suspicious files. They can be considered complementary solutions.
The summary above is based on 99 interviews we conducted recently with Palo Alto Networks WildFire and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The deployment capability is a great feature."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization."
"The product is not resource-intensive."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"The graphic user interface of Palo Alto is good and it's easy to configure."
"The most valuable feature is the improved security that it offers."
"The solution has plenty of features."
"The most valuable features of this solution are sandbox capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses."
"The analysis is very fast."
"High availability with active-active and active-passive modes."
"I give the initial setup an eight out of ten."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"The product's false positive logs could be more user-friendly to understand. They could provide examples of precious cases to learn."
"It would be nice if there was an easier way to install and deploy it, such as through the inclusion of wizards."
"Any enhancements should likely be focused on the firewall appliance to further strengthen overall security capabilities, such as refining app and user identity features."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
"High availability features are lacking."
"The deployment model could be better."
"Many years back an update caused an issue with the firewall. However, Palo Alto not only informed us of said issue, they also sent an update that fixed the issue before I even had time to log in to determine if the issue affected our services."
"The solution can improve its traffic management."
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Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 41 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Cisco Secure Email, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, Proofpoint Email Protection, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and Cloudflare. See our Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs. Palo Alto Networks WildFire report.
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